American democracy: An increasingly unstable complex adaptive system

Complex adaptive system

Complex adaptive system (CAS): a system that is complex because it operates as a dynamic network of interactions, but the behavior of the ensemble or the whole may is not always predictable according to the behavior of the components; examples include nations, groups of people, traffic flow, the internet, systems of government, ecosystems, financial markets, army ants, bee hives, and individual brains (discussed here before)

Consilience: agreement between different approaches to a topic of different academic subjects, especially science and the humanities; agreement among different approaches increases the likelihood that a belief supported by consilience is more apt to be real and more accurate than one based on data and analysis from a single source of research

Consilience has emerged regarding American democracy. Researchers applying CAS theory to it see that our democracy is in serious trouble. Researchers assert that a major component feeding the instability is political and social polarization and the loss of mental diversity among people in groups who self-associate and are not exposed to different facts and political opinions.

One source comments on several papers on American democracy and its status as a CAS. The papers were published together on Dec. 6, 2021 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS):   

Much like an overexploited ecosystem, the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States — and much of the world — is experiencing a catastrophic loss of diversity that threatens the resilience not only of democracy, but also of society, according to a series of new studies that examine political polarization as a collection of complex ever-evolving systems.

Ultimately, as social interactions and individual decisions isolate people into only a few intractable camps, the political system becomes incapable of addressing the range of issues — or formulating the variety of solutions — necessary for government to function and provide the services critical for society.

“The complex systems perspective demonstrates that the loss of diversity associated with polarization undermines cooperation and the ability of societies to provide the public goods that make for a healthy society,” according to an introduction by issue editors Simon Levin, Princeton’s James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Helen Milner, the B.C. Forbes Professor of Public Affairs and professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, and Charles Perrings, professor of environmental economics at ASU.

“Polarization is a dynamic process and that is what complexity theory can best help us understand,” they wrote. “As environmental and complexity scientists have shown in other contexts, diversity maintenance is critical for many systems to thrive, and often to survive at all.”

Complex adaptive systems are widespread in fields from physics and financial systems to natural systems driven by evolution and socioeconomic-political systems, said Levin, who is director of the Center for BioComplexity based in Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI).

Neurologist Steven Novella at Neurologica blog comments on this research:

What various researchers found is that when we obtain our political news from a network of like-minded people several things happen. First, the group tends to narrow over time in terms of political diversity. This happens because those who are considered “not pure enough” are ejected from the network, or leave because they feel less welcome. Further, people within the network tend to get access to less and less political news total, and the news they are exposed to is increasingly polarized. This doesn’t happen when such networks do not routinely share political news to begin with.

The core problem, therefore, seems to be the diversity of sources of information. Similar networks of people, in fact, can have a moderating effect on individual members, if the group maintains a diversity of sources of information reflecting a diversity of political opinions. Further, a healthy moderating effect is supported by individual members exploring outside the group for sources of information.

These patterns follow similar mathematical trends to other very different phenomena in other complex adaptive systems. For example, such trends tend to be non-linear, meaning the more extreme they get the more the trend accelerates. Further, there seems to be tipping points of no return. Once such information networks are radicalized beyond a certain point there may be no way back. Their models indicate that Republicans are likely already beyond this tipping point, while Democrats are rapidly approaching it.

What, then, can be done? As individuals the apparent solution is to maintain a diversity of information sources, and continue to explore for new sources. Don’t rely on any one or limited number of networks of like-minded people for your information. Further, strive to be tolerant of a diversity of opinions among your various social circles.

What can we do as a society? This is a tougher question. Some have argued, I think reasonably, that we may need to bring back the fairness doctrine in news reporting. There is also a lot of focus on social media algorithms, which seem to have automated the very effects that these researchers warn against, sucking people into an epistemic bubble of increasingly narrow and radical views.

Local depolarization vs. global polarization

A PNAS news site comments:

In the polarization studies that have been done to date, says Macy, one of the most striking insights is how much of it can be explained by the interplay of just two sociological forces. One of them is the assimilation, or “influence” effect: People who interact a lot will eventually start to think and act alike.

This effect is so strong, and so well documented in the literature, that social scientists spent decades trying to figure out why polarization exists at all—or why, for that matter, humans are divided by language, fashion, cuisine, music, folkways, and a host of other differences. Why do these divisions often endure for centuries, instead of gradually fading away as the assimilation effect seemed to predict?

A big part of the answer turned out to be the second force, homophily: people’s preference for hanging out with others like themselves. One influential study of the power of homophily was Robert Axelrod’s 1997 model of culture formation. This model turned out to anticipate today’s rural–urban split between Republicans and Democrats, as well as the self-reinforcing echo chambers that have now become familiar on Twitter and Facebook.

Recent modeling work has also yielded a second key insight about polarization: namely, the crucial role played by negative emotions, which can turn both influence and homophily inside out. Just as people can be drawn together by the influence effect, says Macy, “they can also become more different from each other through negative influence,” also known as “repulsion.” And the flip side of homophily is xenophobia, he says, “which is the tendency to run away from those who are different.”

Negative emotion is obviously crucial for understanding the intergroup venom we’re seeing today. But Noah Friedkin, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points out that efforts to model its effects actually date back to the birth of “balance theory” in the 1940s and 1950s.

Recent years have seen a marked rise in “affective” polarization, a feeling of mutual dislike and mistrust between the two sides. The trend is illustrated in data from the American National Election Survey: People's feeling of warmth toward members of their own party (green) has held steady since 1980, whereas their feelings toward members of the other party (purple) have dropped. The difference (black) is a measure of affective polarization.

But just about everyone in this field is considerably less optimistic about proposals to reform social media. For one thing, it’s not clear how effective any such reforms would be. Even though Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms are widely viewed as vectors for misinformation and employed as partisan echo chambers, researchers are still arguing about how much they actually contribute to polarization. According to some studies, in fact, the algorithms that determine what users see in their feeds are just bit players; most of the online divisions come from people sorting themselves the way they always have, through “birds-of-a-feather” homophily.

For another thing, the reforms could easily backfire. In 2018, for example, Bail led a team that tested a frequently proposed idea for opening up the echo chambers. They paid more than 1,600 Republican and Democratic Twitter users to follow bots that would periodically show them tweets from figures in the opposite party. “The hope was that this would lead to moderation,” says Bail. But in fact, he says, people mostly just recoiled from the discordant information. “Nobody became more moderate,” he says. “And Republicans, in fact, became significantly more conservative.”

That is sobering news. It seems that the Democrats are polarizing, presumably significantly or mostly in response to Republican polarization, which has been building for decades as social changes became increasingly unpleasant for what appears to be most or nearly all conservatives. When a CAS like American democracy becomes too unstable, it enters a period of chaos starting at a bifurcation point. The end result is unpredictable. Some form of authoritarianism, autocracy, fascism, plutocracy, kleptocracy, laisses-faire capitalism, and/or Christian theocracy could be plausible end results and the start of a new period of equilibrium. Far less plausible outcomes would seem to be true socialism, communism or anarchy. 

Since the election of the ex-president in 2016, it has felt as if the US entered a period of relative social and political chaos and unpredictability, which continues today. However, that is just a personal observation.

Other information source: Political sectarianism in America, A poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion, and moralization poses a threat to democracy, 2020

Question: Do CAS research results indicating increasing instability in American democracy seem plausible, or is this merely an academic curiosity?

Bifurcation map of the CAS of population growth of an animal

(when the line splits in two, the CAS has bifurcated 

and the system changes in ways that tend to be unpredictable)